UTOPIC CELLS
From September 20th until November 24th
This fall, Zuzeum Art Centre will present UTOPIC CELLS, a solo exhibition by American artist Donna Huanca. This multi-sensory project incorporates painting, sculpture, video, sound, and scents. UTOPIC CELLS marks the artist’s most comprehensive, large-scale, solo institutional exhibition in the Baltics. Donna’s works are featured in the Zuzāns Collection and inspired this project, specially created for Zuzeum.
The exhibition presents a multi-dimensional landscape guiding the viewer through a translucent, biodegradable membrane that creates a new architecture within the open plan of Zuzeum. These translucent “cells” sculpt and shape the space, dividing them into a multitude of intimate enclosures while gradually expanding and contracting as we progress through the exhibition.
Donna Huanca builds a new and experimental scenery with each of her installations, always hinting at previous bodies of work and still, crafted with attention for its singular context and architecture. She uses materials intimately connected to the natural world, such as oils, sand, and clay.
Huanca’s paintings exist as microcosms of her performances, which involve painted bodies adorned with clay, textile, or pigments. Canvases are enlivened by fragments of paint, latex, and other artificial yet skin-like materials, entering in an intimate dialogue with the surrounding organic components, overlaid with a dense, gestural layering of paint reminiscent of ritual and ceremonial practices.
Donna Huanca’s totemic sculptures merge clothing, natural fibers, synthetic hair and other cultural artifacts, which are then taken apart and reassembled to build intricate and abstract three-dimensional entities. Coated in textured paint mixed with sand, these shapes shelter and display parts of the exhibition space, drawing on natural mineral patterns and rock formations, recalling the pigments used in her paintings.
Embedded in the installation are sound and scent works that further immerse the viewer in this multi sensory universe. An earthy fragrance of palo santo, a holy wood native to South America, traditionally used in the purification rituals and cleansing ceremonies of various folk and spiritual cultures, permeates the space. Sound and scent also reveal Huanca’s ongoing reflection on the subconscious, placing the viewer in a meditative and transcendental state, while inviting them to remain grounded in their body.
In UTOPIC CELLS, Huanca creates a versatile and dynamic space in which the visitor becomes an integral part of the installation, as their own movements interact with the reflective sculptures, in turn responding to the paintings.
Donna Huanca (b. 1980 in Chicago, US) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the human body and the natural world, through mark making, raw materials, immersive environments, and singular topographies. Encompassing painting, sculpture and live performance, as well as sound and scent works, Huanca’s installations are specially created for and intricately woven into the specific architectural spaces in which they are presented.
Inspired by Indigenous systems of communication, where objects serve as multi-purpose signifiers, Huanca uses objects and materials as repositories that aggregate and convey knowledge, information, and memory. Deeply rooted in communal practice and ritual, her kaleidoscopic practice creates shared spaces for transcendence, meditation, and transformation.
The performers Huanca commissions to inhabit her installations expand her non-static vocabulary and their painted skin becomes a major element in the composition. Huanca is interested in the fluidity of earthly cycles such as birth, decay, and renewal, and her impermanent paintings on the performers’ bodies are photographed, collaged and manipulated into future works, masking and unmasking the traces of the human body beneath them. Through overlapping temporalities and narratives, Huanca’s multilayered works embody an allegory of both the fragmentation and connectedness of our shared human experience.
Huanca’s numerous solo exhibitions include the Faurschou, New York (2023), Sean Kelly, New York (2023), Museo de Arte Zapopan, Mexico (2023), Space K, Seoul (2023), the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2022), Arnolfini, Bristol (2022), Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2021), Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles (2019), Copenhagen Contemporary, Denmark (2019), and the Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2018). Her work has entered numerous collections worldwide, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, YUZ Museum, Shanghai, Rubell Museum, Miami, and Belvedere Museum, Vienna, among others.
Images:
1. Donna Huanca. PMA. 2017. Peres Projects.
2. Donna Huanca. VULPINAS HAIR WASH. 2023. Peres Projects.
3. Donna Huanca. PMA DIARY (AZUL). 2022. Peres Projects.